Had two snipes fail at around 3:30 PM eastern today with the same message above. I happened to be monitoring both auctions on eBay and when the first one ended well under what I was sniping and it was apparent that my bid hadn't been submitted, I went to the second one and entered a manual bid and got that one.

When I went to get onto gixen.com to see what happened, the web site was unavailable. I have a subscription, so I would have hoped the mirror would have picked it up, but there seems to have been, basically, a site wide outage.

This was not a problem with my eBay login, since I was already logged in and have had no problem logging in subsequently.

I"m able to get in now and both snipes (ended) have the same error message.

Had two snipes fail at around 3:30 PM eastern today with the same message above. I happened to be monitoring both auctions on eBay and when the first one ended well under what I was sniping and it was apparent that my bid hadn't been submitted, I went to the second one and entered a manual bid and got that one.

When I went to get onto gixen.com to see what happened, the web site was unavailable. I have a subscription, so I would have hoped the mirror would have picked it up, but there seems to have been, basically, a site wide outage.

This was not a problem with my eBay login, since I was already logged in and have had no problem logging in subsequently.

I"m able to get in now and both snipes (ended) have the same error message.

What happened?

...............

I had the same problem: 182309547777- EBAY ERROR: LOGIN TIMEOUT (1)
I was at the computer and not bid manually. Because I believe in Gixen. But it did not work. I lost valuable deal. What I pay Gixen after it did not work. Damn it.

I just looked at this, and it seems like eBay had an outage of a sort that lasted half an hour or so. All requests were timing out, both on main and mirror. I am guessing that manual login was also not possible during this time, but if you had a different experience, please let me know.

I've had this before myself... if you are already logged in you are fine... but for a period Ebay does not accept new login attempts...

Unfortunately, Gixen does have to log in within a few minutes of the bid having to be placed... it can't really operate with all users logged in all the time, just to get over this issue that admittedly does occur occasionally.

It is, none the less, as I have explained, an issue caused by a failure at Ebay and not by the Gixen software._________________Mark

The reason I know the behaviour exists with Ebay is because I manage multiple Ebay accounts and often swap between them, or indeed am logged into more than one at a time... much like the operation that Gixen performs from its servers in order to place snipes._________________Mark

I can't say, for sure, that the reports and your experience are totally unconnected.

However, it wouldn't produce quite the behaviour that has been described, because the Gixen sniping software is separate from the web service. Both read and update the same database, within the Main hosting facility, sure, but otherwise are different processes. There are multiple servers in the Main configuration, so in general it isn't even the same machines we are talking about.

So though a DNS attack could certainly bring down the web service, even if that happened it wouldn't cause snipes to fail as well.

If it weren't for the fact that the Mirror was also failing, I would suspect the cause of this behaviour you describe to be the whole of the Main hosting facility being off-line... ie having no connection to or from the internet... but that wouldn't explain why the Mirror, which is hosted in a completely different hosting facility, with a copy of the database, would also fail to place the bids.

All those circumstances together still, for me, point to the problem being most likely with Ebay servers.

Perhaps even Ebay were also repelling an attack of logins and blocked everyone for a while, or reached full capacity of the number of requests even they could attempt to process, in order to deal with it. But without some confirmation from Ebay that is definitely in the realms of wild speculation._________________Mark